Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ Extends the Life of Your Outdoor Water Hydrant (Hose Bibb, Spigot) by Allowing Weep Hole Inspection

Not only does the Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ allow you to replace your hydrant in minutes WITHOUT DIGGING, but it also extends the life of your frost-free hydrant (hose bibb, spigot, garden faucet) — saving you even more money in maintenance costs over the lifetime of your yard hydrant.

The Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ improves hydrant longevity in three ways:

  1. The casing (hydrant sleeve) keeps the soil off your hydrant, protecting against external corrosion. Here’s another article about that.

  2. The filtered drainage section enhances drainage reliability by helping to keep dirt out of the hydrant’s weep hole — one of the most common causes of yard hydrant failure.

  3. The Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ allows you to easily inspect the hydrant’s weep hole. This is the point we will expound in this article.

As you probably know by now, a frost-free yard hydrant has a weep hole at the bottom of the hydrant (in the brass valve body) that allows the hydrant to drain when it is shut off. If anything impedes its ability to drain, the hydrant is no longer freeze-proof. If this happens in freezing weather, the hydrant can freeze, preventing water flow and potentially cracking the hydrant head or, less commonly, the hydrant’s riser pipe.

Potential causes for loss of drainage include:

  1. A hose left attached to the hydrant, preventing drainage when the hydrant is turned off.

  2. The weep hole getting stopped up with dirt.

  3. The weep hole getting plugged with mineral deposits (very common in well water systems).

This means that a large percentage of hydrants that end up being replaced could last much longer if only the weep hole could be inspected and cleaned periodically — a point echoed by many of the hundreds of folks we talked to recently at the National Farm Machinery Show. Before the advent of the Yard Hydrant Made Easy™, inspecting the weep hole was impossible on most hydrants because it would require digging up the hydrant. Since that is a labor-intensive, expensive process, most people would simply run their hydrants to failure.

But that does not have to be the case. By installing your hydrant in a Yard Hydrant Made Easy™, if ever you suspect your hydrant is not draining properly, be it from soil ingress into the weep hole or hard water (mineral deposits) plugging the weep hole from the inside, you can pull it out any time for inspection. Simply turn off your water, remove the top cap from the Yard Hydrant Made Easy™, and pull out the hydrant. You can then check the weep hole to see if it is plugged, and if needed, clean it out with a small piece of wire. This can extend the life of the hydrant well beyond the typical lifespan of a hydrant installed directly in the soil.

There you have it. The patented Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ is THE way to reduce the lifetime cost and frustration of your frost-free yard hydrants. Click here to read another article explaining why the Yard Hydrant Made Easy™ pitless casing system beats out other “hydrant sleeves” on the market.

E.D.